


Insomnia

by Sholio



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 19:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9919853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Iris can't sleep, so she ends up at STAR Labs late at night. Set in the back half of season two.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this fic back in January for a Harrison Wells Appreciation event on Tumblr, which apparently ended up not being a thing (there was never a collection created for it). I had been assigned to write about Iris and a Harrison Wells - you got assigned a small selection of characters to choose from, and then got to pick your Wells. As Iris and Harry had very little interaction on the show, I thought they'd be fun to write about. I never finished it because of the aforementioned not-happening of the ficathon, but dusted it off this week and realized there was just another scene or two to write, so I went ahead and finished. Thanks to sheron for doing a quick beta on it for me!
> 
> This is also for my "undeserved reputation" h/c bingo square. (Harry vs. Eobard.)

Iris can't sleep.

To be honest, she's been prone to insomnia all her life, an off-and-on thing that tends to visit her in times of stress, going back to childhood. But it's blown up since Eddie's death. 

Most of the time, she feels pretty much okay. She likes her life. She has her own little apartment. She has a job she enjoys, a family who love and support her, a long-lost baby brother.

A dead fiancé, an absent and then dead mother ...

And she lies awake at night, trying not to let her thoughts spin down the same well-worn tracks of grief and loss. She turns to touch the cool, empty sheets next to her, and thinks it might not be so hard if she hadn't lost both of them. She wishes she could roll over and rest her head on Eddie's shoulder and tell him about her mom, pour out the mingled resentment and love and despair that she doesn't dare share with her father, who is dealing with enough of his own emotions already. She wishes she could sink into her mother's arms and tell her about Eddie, about their shared hopes for the future and the problems she wishes they'd had time to overcome. Some conversations can't be had with fathers and brothers, no matter how much they love you.

But she doesn't have those things, so she gets up and makes herself another pot of coffee, and wonders about texting Barry to see if he's up, and in the end decides not to bother him.

Sometimes she walks to tire herself out enough to sleep.

Tonight, she walks long enough to end up at STAR Labs.

It's strange being here in the middle of the night. She lets herself in through the secure entrance. The hallways are dimly lit and quiet. She doesn't think she's ever been here by herself. STAR Labs isn't her place; it never has been. It's their place. Barry's friends welcomed her, but she still feels a little unsure of herself here. It's the way Barry must feel when he comes to CCPN to pick her up for an occasional lunch -- an interloper into a workplace that's not his. It's how she feels when she visits the police station, too.

A brief twinge of a road not taken: she thinks of her childhood dreams of being a cop like her idolized father, dashed when Joe forbade her the police academy. She doesn't regret it now; she truly loves being a journalist. But she wonders what kind of cop she would have made.

She ventures quietly into the Cortex, looking around at the computer screens showing dimmed readouts or slowly shifting pictures or nothing at all, at the incomprehensible pieces of technology lying about in half-dismantled states.

"Iris West. You're here late." 

Iris nearly jumps out of her skin.

It's Harrison Wells, the other Harrison Wells, turning around in a chair from one of the computer displays. She didn't even see him. He was so still, so quiet, blending into the dim background in his all-black clothes. Two of his fingers are looped through the handle of a coffee mug.

Somehow she'd forgotten that he lives here. That he'd be here at all hours.

"It's three a.m.," she blurts out before she can stop herself. "Don't you sleep?"

He gazes at her, the lenses of his glasses glinting in the computer screen's glow, hiding his eyes. Then a quick, dry smile twists the corner of his mouth. "Not often," he says, and stands. "Want coffee?"

"Uh ... sure?"

She really did intend to leave so as not to bother him, but it turns out that Wells on a mission is difficult to say no to, so instead she follows him out of the Cortex and into Cisco's workshop. The rich smell of fresh-brewed coffee greets her. Wells ... Harrison ... Harry takes a clean cup with the STAR Labs logo from a scattering of mugs beside the pot. "Take anything in it?" he asks absently as he fills it.

"Not if I'm going to make it back to my apartment without falling asleep on the way." She inhales, then sips. She's expecting the sort of overbrewed, too-long-on-the-hot-plate coffee that she's come to expect from institutional settings across the city, from the CCPD to the Picture News on those days when her boss doesn't spring for the good stuff (which is usually). But this is ... good. Excellent, actually.

Something about her expression produces another of those brief smiles. "What's the point of being a genius," he asks, topping off his own mug, "if you can't have a good cup of coffee?"

She's feeling both impish and bold, buoyed by the jittery feeling of too much caffeine and not enough sleep, and so she asks, "Are you talking about Cisco or yourself?"

She's not expecting him to smile again, however brief. It's probably the most she's ever seen him smile. "It was a joint effort."

His wrist thingie beeps at him, making her jump again. She can't help thinking about how a similar one, or maybe the same, kept beeping at Jesse, before Jesse left. He flips it open and pokes at it, then spins around and pokes at one of the screens, somehow syncing the data between them, Iris guesses. Inasmuch as she can tell what anyone is doing with this kind of technology when it's more advanced than uploading photos from a flash drive.

"Are you having any luck finding her?" she asks quietly, hands cupped around the warm mug of coffee. It's only a guess, but she's not sure why he would be up this late unless it has something to do with his daughter.

"Working on it," he says quietly, poking at the fine controls in his wrist thing with a pointy tool he picked up from one of the shelves. 

Iris isn't sure whether she's been dismissed or not. After a minute, she sits down on a stool to drink her coffee.

It's very odd being here with him, just the two of them, no Barry or Cisco or Caitlin. This is the man who was responsible for Eddie's death. The man who killed Barry's mother.

But Harry isn't that man, and she thinks it's eventually managed to sink in for all of them, even Barry, even Cisco.

She's not sure if she knows this man yet, but she knows who he isn't. And she's not entirely sure what made Jesse leave, but remembering her own fights with Joe as a teenager, she can guess the general tenor of it.

She does know she's not afraid being here alone with him at night, and that's an interesting thought.

After a few minutes of tinkering, he glances up and frowns. "You're still here."

"Finishing my coffee," she explains, raising the cup.

"Ah." Another pause, and then he says, "Are you -- that is, it's the middle of the night. Do you need me to ... call Allen or Detective West? Or someone?"

"Oh, no, I'm all right." She's oddly touched, though for all she knows it's less concern for her and more of a desire to avoid the risk of an awkward emotional situation. "No, it's just ..." She gestures with the coffee cup. "I can't sleep sometimes. I get to thinking about Eddie, and ... things."

"Eddie." There's an odd look on his face, and she actually doesn't know why for a minute until he says, "Your fiancé. The one who was killed by the man with my face."

"Yes, that's Eddie." Unexpectedly, she finds herself smiling. "And I suppose it's not entirely accurate to say that he was killed by -- by _that_ Wells. By Eobard Thawne. He died to save us, but it was really his choice." Harry's gone back to poking at the inner workings of his watch, but she thinks he's still listening, and maybe that's what makes her ask softly, "Has anyone actually told you what happened to him? To Eddie, I mean."

"No." A quick glance up. "It's not something I've been inclined to ask questions about."

"Do you ... want to hear?"

She fully expects him to say no, but instead he hesitates for a minute and then says abruptly, as if coming to a sudden decision, "Okay."

She can't tell if he's just being polite or not, but his attention is on her now, and he does seem to be listening, so she tells him about that terrible night. She tries to do it quickly, hitting the highlights rather than dwelling on the emotional details, but slowly she begins to realize that telling the story isn't as painful as she expected.

She's gone over it a million times in her mind -- the worst parts, anyway -- and she's wept about it in her dad's arms, but she's never really talked to anyone about it like this. Not just related the events as they occurred to someone who wasn't there, who has no reason to feel an emotional connection to anyone in this story.

She's never talked about it to someone who wasn't involved.

And she realizes as she tells the story just how much it really was Eddie's choice, in the end. It was no different from Eddie dying in the line of duty, which was something she had always known was a risk; as a cop's daughter, she knows the risks better than most. He went out a hero, sacrificing his life to save all of them and to make sure they would always be safe.

She has to touch her face to realize she's crying. Talking about it still hurts, but it's not the all-consuming pain from those early weeks. She's just sad, now, not broken.

Harry fumbles frantically in the mess scattered across the worktable and eventually finds a small box of tissues, which he passes to her.

"Thanks." She wipes her eyes and blows her nose, then smiles weakly at him. "Sorry."

"I'm the parent of a teenager." He smiles, and and Iris is slightly taken aback, because she's not sure if she's seen his real smile before -- it's gentle and warm and altogether not an expression she can imagine ever seeing on the face of that other Wells. "I'm used to dealing with sudden fits of weeping."

This makes her laugh even through the last vestiges of her tears. "My poor dad can probably relate. He was a single dad too, you know." She blows her nose a final time and looks around for a trash can. Harry hooks one with his foot and kicks it in her direction. "So," she says, dropping a handful of crumpled tissues into it. "No one ever told you about Eddie?"

"Not in detail, no. It hasn't really come up."

A sudden thought occurs to her. "Do you know if Eddie is still alive on your Earth? Does he exist there?"

His quick headshake gives her a sharp pain under the ribs, until he says, "I don't know. I never met him. He's not a meta; that's all I know."

"Oh. Thank you." Earth-2 Eddie is probably alive, she thinks. There's no reason why he wouldn't be -- well, okay, except for the kind of random things that happen to everybody. Maybe Eddie in that universe is still a cop, and maybe he _did_ die in the line of duty. But the odds are still pretty good that he's okay.

And she's never really thought about it like that before. Knowing that there's a whole multiverse out there, full of different versions of all the people she knows, is something that's always been purely theoretical to her. It's only real because of the people she's actually met from those other universes, like Harry and Jesse and the various criminals who have come here to try to kill Barry.

But now that she thinks about it, if there are an infinite number of other Earths, that means there are also lots of Earths where all the people who are dead here are still alive and well. There are probably Earths where she grew up with two parents and with Wally in her life from the beginning. There are Earths where Barry's parents are still alive. There are Earths where she's married to Eddie, ones where she's married to Barry, and probably ones where she's married to people she's never even met, or not married at all and living a happy life as a reporter or a cop or, who knows what, a doctor or an engineer or the President of the United States.

That's actually one of the most comforting thoughts she's had in a very long time. 

"You sure you don't want me to call somebody?" Harry asks, and she realizes she's zoned out, staring past him at the wall.

"Oh ... no, it's not that anything is wrong, I was just thinking about --" It feels stupid to say it out loud. Especially to someone who knows way more than she does about alternate universes. But she still feels like she ought to say it, because maybe she's not the only one who's never quite thought about it this way. Maybe he needs to hear it too. 

"I was thinking about other universes," she says, "and about how -- no matter how badly things go here, this isn't our only shot at it. Somewhere out there, other versions of us are making different decisions and living different lives. And they're always going to be there, no matter what we do." She manages to laugh; it's a little watery, but genuine. "Is that stupid? Is it not how it works?"

"No," Harry says, watching her. "No, I don't think it's stupid at all. It's exactly how it works. And believe me." Another quick smile, with warmth in it. "I don't hesitate to tell people when I think they're saying something stupid."

"Yes, I've noticed that."

He grins, and she's struck all over again by how different he is when he just relaxes, maybe only because he's too tired to keep the walls up. "Of course," he says, "that's only true if we don't inadvertently invent something that wipes out half the universes in the local space-time continuum in the process of trying to destroy some metahuman enemy, because that seems like something we'd do."

Iris leans forward, frowning at him, at the bruised-looking shadows under his eyes and the way his hands are shaking a little. "You are _very_ tired."

"Yes," he admits. "Yes, I am that, Miss West."

"Well, then." She hops down and takes his arm, not without the slightest of qualms, but he allows her to steer him out of Cisco's workshop with a vaguely bemused expression. "You should sleep, and so should I. Uh, where do you sleep?"

"Mmm. Elevator."

He's weaving on his feet when they get off on the floor he indicates. You don't get like this on just one night of missing a few hours' sleep, Iris thinks, as a veteran of insomnia herself. This kind of dead-on-your-feet exhaustion is the legacy of a lot of sleepless nights, and she's starting to think it's not just Jesse's absence that's done it to him.

She propels him down the hall, thinking of nights she herded her father to bed when he'd been out for three nights running on a case, nights that she made Barry sit down and catch some sleep when he was pulling another all-nighter in college -- and nights when they did it for her, too, making her cocoa and putting her to bed. Because sometimes you need someone to do that for you.

She thinks of what little she knows about Harry's life before he came here. She's never heard him talk about friends. She knows that Jesse's mother is dead. From what she understands, it was just him and Jesse for a very long time, and when you're the parent and caretaker, who takes care of you?

Her friends got her through Eddie's death, through her mother's death. Now she feels, in a way, as if she's paying it back a little bit.

His room on the lower levels of STAR Labs is nicer than she was expecting. It's a little bit institutional-looking, but there are pictures on the walls and some lab stuff scattered around, like he works down here sometimes too. "This isn't too bad," she says. "I mean, it's kind of homelike."

"Jesse made it that way." He slumps down on the nearest of the two beds, and starts unlacing his boots. "Before she got here, it was basically just ... a bed, in a room. Jesse ..." He laughs softly, a hoarse sound, and tugs off his boot with a vicious yank. "She made it a home."

Iris had never really thought about it. From the beginning, Harry was just sort of _there,_ a new and not entirely welcome presence in their lives. Unlike Barry and Cisco and Caitlin and her dad, she'd never spent much time around him, never really worked with him.

But she thinks, now, about how angry and defensive he used to be. Thinking of what she now knows about his life then -- with Jesse locked up in another world, possibly dead for all he knew -- she looks around at the room, at its concrete walls, and imagines this place without the embellishments. It's all too easy to do. A concrete tomb, she thinks, with a single cot in it, a place to crash when a person has worked themselves to the bone --

Yes. She can imagine it.

No wonder he doesn't sleep much.

"Harry," she says, a bit cautiously. "Do you like cocoa?"

He looks up, startled. Makes an inquiring noise.

"It's only," she says, a little shyly, "when I couldn't sleep, or Barry couldn't sleep, my dad would make cocoa for us. You have cocoa on Earth-2, right? You know what it is?"

"Yeah, we have cocoa." He waves a hand tiredly, slumped on the edge of his cot. "Check Ramon's workshop. He's got every damn snack food known to man in there."

Iris dashes off. In Cisco's workshop, she pokes around until she finds cocoa packets and an electric kettle. She makes it up in two STAR Labs mugs, aware as she does so that she's probably going to go back down to find Harry asleep. And that'd probably be a good thing, given how exhausted he looked.

But when she comes in, he's stretched out on one of the cots -- boots off, everything else still on -- lying on his back and flipping through a thick physics book. "You're still here," he says, surprised.

"I said I was bringing cocoa."

"Yeah, well -- I thought you were leaving."

"No," she says, and puts a mug of cocoa on the table beside his bed, not quite bold enough to put it directly in his hand ... but he does pick it up. She looks around for a place to sit, and ends up sitting on the edge of the other neatly made cot. It's more comfortable than it looks. In fact, it's so comfortable she tries lying down, and that's even better -- curled on her side, facing Harry, with a hand half-wrapped around the mug's handle on the bed beside her.

"You're going to find her," she says. "Your daughter."

Harry looks up from his book. The mug of cocoa is resting on his chest now, corralled with one hand; he sips from it occasionally. "I know."

Iris can't help laughing. 

He gives her a puzzled frown. "Are you falling asleep over there?"

"No," she slurs sleepily. "Yes. Maybe."

Now there's the slightest hint of a dry smile. "Is Detective West going to kick my ass if he finds you here?"

"Probably," she mumbles. For a fold-up cot, this is _very_ comfortable. She moves her cocoa to the steel stand beside the bed so she doesn't spill it, and curls up with her eyes closed.

 

***

 

She wakes with a jolt with sunlight streaming through the window above the bed. The clock on the wall reads 7:12. She's alone, but a blanket has been draped over her.

There's just enough time to go home, shower, change, and maybe grab a bagel before she needs to show up for work at CCPN. And she also wants to get out of here before Barry or anyone else gets here -- it's not that she's embarrassed, exactly, but she doesn't really want to run into them in the hallway and have to explain why she's here at seven in the morning.

But she folds the blanket neatly and wanders up to the lab level before she leaves. It's not hard to find Harry; there's music playing quietly in Cisco's lab. Iris leans on the doorframe for a minute and watches him work, before she says, "The BeeGees? Really?"

Harry flinches violently; the screwdriver he's working with goes sailing across the lab table. "Are you still here?"

"I'm leaving. I just wanted to say ..."

What _does_ she want to say? That's the $64,000 question, isn't it. _Thanks for giving me a place to go last night_ and _I know it wasn't you that killed Eddie_ and _Thank you for helping take care of Barry_ and _I hope you find your daughter soon_ \-- all of these things, but she doesn't really know him well enough, so instead she says the first irrelevant thing that comes into her head. "The tag on your sweater is showing."

"What? Oh ..." He slaps a hand at the back of his neck and flips it in. The look he gives her is a wry one. "You came all the way up to the lab to tell me that, Miss West?"

"Just saving you from a fashion faux pas." She takes a step back. "It's what friends do, isn't it?" And then she's out the door, aware (from the corner of her eye) when he turns around quickly, but by that point she's already vanishing from sight, heading down to the exit level.

It's not completely accurate anyway. They aren't precisely friends, not as individuals. But ... he's part of the group now, part of this odd little STAR Labs family that Barry's somehow stumbled into the middle of. She can sense that just from being around the others. He's Barry's friend, and Cisco and Caitlin's friend.

Which, by the transitive property of friendship, makes him her friend too.

And she thinks that if she has more sleepless nights, it won't be so bad. She has somewhere to go, and someone to talk to.

The company, it turns out, is pretty good here at night.


End file.
